News 7/21/23

Top News

Private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners sells specialty EHR/PM vendor Nextech to another PE firm, TPG, for $1.4 billion.

THL bought the company for $500 million in June 2019, after which it acquired TouchMD and MyMedLeads.

Reader Comments

From Jetty: “Re: forgiven federal Paycheck Protection Program loans. The DOJ is investigating those of over $1 million. Big-dollar exhibitors at ViVE and HIMSS are large takers of these forgiven loans that were intended to keep workers employed during COVID-19.” The reader compared ProPublica’s PPP loan database to online sources that estimate the revenue of privately held companies, noting that two health IT companies derived more than 20% of their annual revenue from forgiven PPP loans, 14 health IT vendors had loans of over $2 million that were forgiven, and 27 HIT companies received $1 million or more of loans that they don’t have to repay. My take: while this is mildly interesting, nothing suggests improper activity. The federal government’s loans – which covered up to eight weeks of payroll costs, including benefits — were forgiven if the recipients documented that at least 60% of the money was spent on payroll. The federal government is reviewing the Small Business Administration’s disbursement of $1.2 trillion in COVID-related loans, of which its OIG estimates that $200 billion involves fraud. The real news will be if the feds accuse any of the health IT companies of wrongdoing, which hasn’t happened.

Webinars

July 26 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Lessons We’ve Learned Since Launching our Cancer Prevention Program.” Sponsor: Volpara Health. Presenter: Albert Bonnema, MD, MPH chief medical information officer, Kettering Health System, and Chris Yuppa, product owner for oncology services and cancer prevention, Kettering Health System. Kettering’s IT department has played a critical role in providing an EHR-driven framework to bring cancer risk assessment and individual prevention plans to more than 90,000 patients. Primary care, OB/GYN, oncology, and imaging providers are now able to assess the hereditary, genetic, and lifestyle factors that affect the risk of developing lung, breast, ovarian, colon, and prostate cancer in any patient encounter. Learn how Kettering brings together people, processes, and technology to be more proactive in the fight against cancer and where its cancer prevention program is headed next.

July 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Why You Shouldn’t Wait to Use Generative AI.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenter: Bill Rogers, co-founder, president, and chairman, Orbita. The advent of generative AI tools truly represents a paradigm shift. And while some healthcare leaders embrace the transformation, others are hesitant. Invest 20 minutes to learn why you shouldn’t wait. When combined with natural language processing, workflow automation and conversational dialogs, generative AI can help leaders address a raft of challenges: from over-extended staff, to the rising demand for self-service tools, to delivering secure information to key stakeholders. You will learn where AI delivers the greatest value for providers and life sciences, how it can solve critical challenges faced by healthcare leaders, and how Orbita has integrated generative AI into its conversational platform so healthcare leaders can leverage its full capabilities safely and securely.

July 27 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Denial Prevention 101: How to stop denials from the start.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Crystal Ewing, director of product management, Waystar. There’s a reason denial prevention is prominent everywhere in healthcare RCM. Denials reduce cash flow, drive down revenue, and negatively impact the patient and staff experience. More than half of front-end denials don’t have to happen, but, once they do, that money is gone. It’s a pretty compelling reason to take some time now to do some preventative care on your revenue cycle. This webinar will help you optimize your front end to stop denials at the start. We’ll explore the importance of not only having the right data, but having it right where staff need it, when they need it.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Open access publisher JMIR Publications acquires the Online Journal of Public Health Informatics.

Sales

• Universal Health Services will expand its Oracle Health acute care EHR implementation to its 200 behavioral health facilities.
• Thomas Jefferson University Hospital will pilot the use of AliveCor’s personal ECG monitoring technology to monitor its methadone maintenance therapy patients for QT prolongation.
• Online behavioral health provider WellQor chooses the Arize EHR of Cantata Health Solutions. 
• Prisma Health will expand its implementation of HealthSnap’s virtual care management platform to all of its ambulatory primary care sites.

People

Weight loss and health coaching platform vendor Noom hires Geoff Cook (The Meet Group) as CEO as the company transitions into the obesity drugs business. He replaces co-founder Saeju Jeong, who will continue as executive board chair.

Prescription benefits technology vendor Capital Rx hires Sunil Budhrani, MD, MPH, MBA (Innovation Health) as chief medical and innovation officer.

Scott Maratea (Motivo Health) joins Curve Health as chief revenue officer.

WellSky promotes Mitchell Morgan, MBA to VP of sales.

Brian Briscoe, MD, who pioneered the implementation of digital radiology in his work at the Baltimore VA in the early 1990s and demonstrated workstation-based image reading at RSNA 2000, died July 2. He was 91.

Industry long-timer Glenn Gross, whose sales roles over the years included time with Tempus Software / QuadraMed and The SSI Group, died last week at 64.

Announcements and Implementations

MemorialCare and Pacific Dental Services will open the first of several planned co-located medical and dental offices, where dentists will use the same Epic system as the center’s family medicine, OB/GYN, and pediatrics physicians. PDS completed its Epic implementation in August 2022, converting the records of 9.7 million patients at its 885 practices in 25 states, training 14,000 employees. The company says using Epic allows its clinicians to create better treatment plans based on oral health’s impact on systemic conditions, identify systemic diseases earlier based on oral health changes, build more trust with patients, and communicate with patients via MyChart.

KU Medical Center interviews Diego Mazzotti, PhD, assistant professor of medical informatics, about his sleep disorder research. He is connecting data from EHRs, CPAP machines, and sleep studies to determine the types of sleep apnea patients who are most at risk for heart disease and to determine the effectiveness of CPAP in preventing it.

South Georgia Medical Center recognizes six members of the IT department’s network team as Health System Heroes for their work in protecting patient privacy and health system security.

Franciscan Alliance will rebadge 61 IT employees of Franciscan Health Indianapolis to managed services provider R4 Solutions.

UCSD nanoengineering researchers say that digital technologies can help mitigate health system burden as life expectancy grows, specifically wearables that allow older adults to monitor their health and maintain independence at home. They predict the rise of smart homes whose body-worn and surveillance tools are connected to telehealth platforms and a cloud analytics platform to provide remote monitoring. They expect to see foot-worn sensors; smart mirrors that can identify appearance changes, detect falls, and serve as a visual display; the use of digital personal assistants to provide reminders and cognitive stimulation; and deployment of robots to support care and to provide stimulation.

Privacy and Security

Froedtert Hospital will pay $2 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its use of Meta’s Pixel web user tracking tool on its MyChart portal and public websites.

Other

Debbie Sukin, MHA, PhD, EVP/CEO of Houston Methodist The Woodlands Hospital, describes present and future use cases of ambient intelligence:

• Using inpatient room technology to prevent falls, create clinical documentation, and monitor hand hygiene while anonymizing the people who are present.
• Tracking OR procedures – start time, turnover time, and instruments used – using AI and machine learning that updates schedules every 60 seconds.
• Assessing patient pain.
• Detecting incontinence.
• Detecting elopement.

Internist Michael Stillman, MD’s “Death by Patient Portal” JAMA opinion piece describes his struggle to management patient portal messages and his decision to send a message to all of his patients laying out his guidelines. He was surprised to find that many of them told him that they, too are fatigued by hundreds of messages each day and an expectation of constant accessibility. He laid out these expectations, which immediately generated 50 responses from patients expressing their support:

• He was spending two hours per day responding to 50 portal messages, some of which would have been directed to other employees before the portal was implemented.
• Despite their convenience, portal messages are not as good as appointments.
• He will respond to messages within three days, but won’t check them after hours and on weekends, suggesting calling the office for more urgent issues.
• Referral and refill messages will be managed by medical assistants.
• Matters related to an upcoming appointment should be saved until then.

Technology entrepreneur and investor David Heinemeier Hansson – who is also a fine business tech writer whose style reminds me of “Joel on Software” — proudly proclaims that “We have left the cloud,” explaining why software vendor 37signals moved six legacy applications, including one that was developed as a cloud application, from AWS back to its own hardware. Points:

• The move will save $1.5 million per year, IT team size didn’t change since the promised productivity gains were never realized anyway, and user response time has improved.
• Total hardware investment was a one-time $500,000, which is amortizable as a capital expense over five years, versus the company’s annual cloud budget of $3.2 million.
• The company rolls out hardware similarly to rental clouds. It buys hardware from Dell, has it shipped to its two data centers, and uses a third-party service to rack the new machines. Each of its two data centers received 20 servers, which he notes from the delivery photo above is “a staggering amount of computing power in a shockingly small footprint” (4,000 vCPUs, 7,680 GB of RAM, and 384 TB of solid-state storage).
• The only negative is that the time between needing new servers and seeing them online is obviously increased, but the author notes that while it’s incredible to see 100 powerful machines spin up on the cloud in just a few minutes, you pay dearly for that privilege. He notes that the load variance in many companies doesn’t justify renting.
• He concludes that the cloud is great for early-stage companies that are either flush with cash or are likely to go broke within two years, but warns that it’s hard to change your mind later when costs increase and the expected reduction in complication doesn’t materialize.

Sponsor Updates

• Hunt Scanlon offers insights from Direct Recruiters in its latest Private Equity Recruiting Report.
• Elsevier publishes a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, “The Health and Economic Impact of Expanding Home Blood Pressure Monitoring.”
• Universal Health Services expands its Oracle Health EHR across its network of behavioral health facilities.
• Healthcare Triangle expands its contract with an existing biopharmaceutical customer to extend the customer’s suite of cloud DevOps, data engineering, and data platform management solutions.
• Fortified Health Security releases its 2023 Mid-Year Horizon Report.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring Greenway Health CMO Michael Blackman, MD.
• Nordic posts a new podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with Dr. Manish Patel”.
• Medhost will exhibit at the Texas Healthcare Governance Conference through July 22 in Austin.

Blog Posts

• Maximize Time & Save Money Through Diverse Fax Automation Options (Vyne Medical)
• Healthcare cybersecurity threats: June 2023 (Fortified Health Security)
• Best Friend Challenge: Healthcare Regulation Edition! (HealthMark Group)
• Note bloat, we can’t quit you (Nordic)
• Biofourmis Marks One Year Post-Series D with Major Milestones and Focused Go-Forward Growth Strategy (Biofourmis)
• EHR Super Users: Making Life Easier for Medical Professionals (HealthTech Resources)
• Transforming Healthcare Operations Through Automation (Vyne Medical)
• Introducing Epic Cheers: Enhancing Patient Experiences with Innovative CRM Solutions (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Hospital Staffing in Summertime (Impact Advisors)
• Reduce Out-of-Network Referrals with Provider Data Management (InterSystems)
• What it Takes to Prepare Students for Clinical Excellence (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Three Essential Questions for QA Leaders to Ask About Automated Healthcare Software Testing (Keysight)
• Improving Disaster Preparedness with EHR Hosting for Rural Hospitals (Medhost)

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